Apr 27, 2011

REVIEW: The Killing (AMC, Sunday 10pm)

Kate and I have been settling into the terminal gloom and splatter patterns of The Killing, which rounds out a day of good deeds and churchgoing quite nicely, we've found. I wouldn't say we love it but we're going to see this thing through. TV thrillers are more of an a priori commitment than cinematic thrillers, it being marginally more trouble to decide you don't like something and stop watching (What if it gets good in the final furlong?) than it is to say you do like it and carry on. I feel much the same way about the British Royal Family, who persist in much the same apathy zone, somewhere between 'I don't dislike them' and 'can't be arsed to figure out how to get rid of them'. Anyway: The Killing. Rainy, windswept, lots of imported Nordic gloom, as if Seattle were playing Denmark, or as if to say: To hell with Nora Ephron and her waterfront christmas lights. We like the leads, particularly Mireille Enos, the sullen, bruised-looking redhead leading the murder investigation and her unintelligible partner Joel Kinnaman, whose every second word gets tangled in his wispy scrubland of beard, never to escape. The plotting is a little high-handed, each episode boiling down to an hour of tense conversations in the rain, with occasional breaks for a spot of grief in a supermarket or Texaco station, generally followed, at the 60th minute, by an Important Plot Point, at which point the program exits with one swoop of its cape, thus lending credence to the idea that TV plotting consists not of spooning out dramatic events, but putting off dramatic events for as long as you reasonably can without full-scale viewer mutiny. It's bigger on mood — a seance session invoking the shades of David Lynch, Thomas Harris and Steig Larsson, whose presence is particularly strong in the exploitation of Goths as 1) creepy vampiric figures likely to lure your daughter into sex, drugs and assorted necromantic acts; also b) pale-faced seers who cut through the hypocrisy of adult society with the uncorrupted clarity of the outsider. The lesson: Goths may force your daughter into unnatural sexual acts but they are also represent a highly elusive and lucrative demographic that pop-dramatists would do well to cosy up to.

6 comments:

It's holding my attention a lot more than "Rubicon," a series which, had it moved any slower, would have been going backwards. I like the same things as you and the missus -- and to that would add the exceptional work of Brent Sexton and Michelle Forbes, the latter of whom deserves some kind of relief pitcher award for television actors due to her stellar work on "True Blood," "In Treatment," and plenty of other shows, including "The Killing." Still, the last episode was the first in which my attention started to waver. My purely idle speculation is that all the sex stuff is a red herring, that what's unfolding is a political crime. At least I hope it is, or that entire subplot is going to seem an even greater waste of time than it feels now. I hope "The Killing" sticks the landing. But like so many other promising shows, I feel a case of the stupids coming on.

Craig, I share with you confusion over the political sub-plot. It does seem very tangential, its existence only explainable if it turns out to be the main event after all. On the other hand, I would be disappointed to learn that we already know the killer. I do hope not. Dear Siren, my country may buckle beneath the weight of its deference to a bunch of balding Germanic bluebloods but we do know how to signal our disdain for their gruelling antics. At least we have that.

Dear Tom, should you ever labor under the common English delusion that we Americans want a royal family of our very own (like a puppy, only with fancier doghouses), try this experiment. Tell an American of whatever political persuasion what the Civil List Grand Total "Check, Please" was for the last tax year. And watch them respond with one of my favorite Americanism: "Do what now?"

I am personally mortified that the networks think Americans are even interested enough to watch them prance around on TV. “What can Americans learn from British politics, economy, and culture?" ask the MSNBC ads. Cue the sound of a million remotes turning over to CNN.

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